Charting Girl Land: Caitlin Flanagan on Her New Book

When Caitlin Flanagan, now a cultural critic at The Atlantic, was a teacher at the Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles, she observed certain constants between the way her female students marked growing up and the way that she (and even her own mother) had, decades before. These seemed peculiar glimmers of a bygone era: the formalities of prom, staged before a wild after-party; the act of diary-keeping amid an age of 140-character Tweets. Again and again, Flanagan felt compelled to revisit these old signposts, now set in a new and, as she saw it, rather troubling context. Flanagan calls this period when girls withdraw in order to come to terms with the reality of womanhood “Girl Land.” Her book by the same name, out today from Reagan Arthur, offers a history of, and guide to, parenting girls (though the author is quick to admit that she herself has only sons). Part social critique, part memoir, and, like Flanagan, a little contrarian, Girl Land is both a moving account of what it means for girls to leave childhood behind, and a chiding of society for not providing a more positive environment through which to make the transition. Vogue caught up with Flanagan, at her home in Los Angeles, over the phone.

How is coming-of-age for girls changing, despite the preservation of its hallmarks?We’re living in a time and a culture where there’s no ability to withdraw anymore, to be private, to close a door. Everything follows you everywhere. The Internet follows you. Connections follow you . . . . Not only that, in addition to whatever academic or athletic opportunities you have—which are much greater than they were in my era certainly—paradoxically is this idea that you’re supposed to simultaneously be as physically pleasing to men as possible. These messages—which are as antithetical to the Girl Land imperatives as you could ever get—are very, very present in these girls’ lives, in the very culture that they’re trying to merge into. I think those things make Girl Land much more fraught and painful and difficult than it was in previous eras.

When did that shift really occur? When did this system break down?The force of culture is, as they always say, progressive and cumulative. Culture’s always moving forward and [while] there are periods of retrenchment, you never really go backward, you never really put the toothpaste back in the tube . . . . I think it’s been hugely accelerated because of this Internet era. We probably would have gotten to the same point, but I think it would have taken us 50 or 60 years instead of six or seven years. So there would have been more of a kind of cultural memory.

With all these different forces at work, what is a parent to do?I think parents are stumped. They didn’t grow up in this Internet age, and there hasn’t been a generation gap for a few decades . . . . Parents feel [the Internet] is uncontrollable, and in a certain sense, it is. But they also feel they’d be holding their daughters back if they heavily restricted their Web use because that’s also the link to so much of what is good and important in life.

When has parenting—and creating a healthy environment for girls in general—been at its best?Oddly enough, I think we have the ability to make this the very best time for girls—we have the access to educational, athletic and (eventual) professional opportunities of a kind no generation of girls has ever had; if we can combine it with a movement to protect them from the corrosive, hypersexualized, crass, and male-dominated popular culture, we could really be onto something big and important for girls.

You write a bit about how girls need literature in part to guide them through their intensely interior lives. What are girls reading today?Girls are the best readers in the world. Reading is really a way of kind of escaping so deeply into yourself and pursuing your own thoughts within the construct of a story. I always look at the Twilight series. [I don’t think] adults could have manufactured a series they would rather girls think about, with its idea of the heightening of passion through the holding back of passion. Girls are really looking to places that have limits and boundaries: where adults are the adults and there are rules, and where they feel safe.

I guess the twin to reading is this idea of diary-keeping. Today, it’s sort of diary-keeping through the Internet, chronicling their private lives online.And so it becomes not private at all . . . . Suddenly, you become this version of yourself that’s more forward, more explicit, more provocative, more brave than you would be than if you were just sort of very privately working something out, and not afraid or ashamed to admit [things] to yourself . . . . The Internet is just the place for the most extreme and forward behavior, when Girl Land is a time of the most reflective, sort of withdrawal.

You have twin boys, and no daughters, correct? Did you feel that you had special clarity on this topic in part because you don’t have daughters?I didn’t write this book from the perspective of being a parent; I wrote it from the perspective of my girlhood being so intense for me . . . . I was the most psychologically alive, the most responsive to music, to movies, to books that I would read (even though I’m a far better read woman at 50 than I ever was as a teenager). Things affected me so deeply. I thought that was just me, but every woman I’ve ever known says the same thing. Very different memories of her adolescence than a man will have.

Every great culture has cared a lot, one way or another, about the fate of its girls. Now the negative: They were often caring for them and protecting them in such a paternalistic way that they were enfeebling their girls. But no one has ever turned away from girls the way that we have. It’s sort of a paradox. On the one hand it’s, “Girls all the time, girls are better than boys, girls can do anything!” . . . . But this idea of protecting them and sheltering them and making a safe space for them, we don’t as a society do, and I think that should be everybody’s responsibility, not just people who happen to have adolescent daughters at home.